We take a look into the Office 2010 Suite and what improvements we can expect over 2007.

The
Office 2010 Technical Preview has been available through Microsoft
Connect for some time now, but reviews seem to be few and far
between.

Before we dig into what the differences are, you can
sign up at Microsoft Connect
or at the Office
2010 Beta page and you too might be able to get your hands on a
copy to test yourself. The Office 2010 Beta would be the best bet,
but for those in good standing with previous Microsoft Connect tests
you might have better luck there.

The first major change to
Office 2010 is the availability of both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of
every application. Not just Excel or Access, the entire suite
including Visio will be available in both flavors. The catch is that
anyone currently running a 32-bit copy of Office will be forced to
completely uninstall that prior to starting the install of the 64-bit
flavors. If you wish to load the 32-bit version of 2010, it works
just like every other upgrade of Office from 97 on up to 2007.

For
the purpose of this review 64-bit Office/Visio 2010 were used on a
64-bit copy of the Windows 7 Ultimate RTM.

Office 2010 weighs
in small with the 64-bit suite coming in at 612MB, and the 32-bit
variant coming in at 548MB. Visio 32-bit and 64-bit weigh in at 300MB
and 350MB respectively. The actual size installed is larger, but the
installers are quite small and on par with the size of the 2007
installation media. Attempting to install the complete suite of
Office 2010 64-bit with all features will cost you a
respectable 2.24GB of disk space. Visio will cost you an additional
1.32GB of disk space. For the full requirements list, a screenshot of
the Microsoft Connect page has been included.

The install
itself will take roughly 4-7 minutes to complete on a 7200RPM drive,
which is about what Office 2007 took on a similar system. Worth
mentioning is Microsoft’s silly feedback program associated with
the Office 2010 preview. It's called "Send-A-Smile" and
quite literally you can click to send them a smiley face or a frown
face based on your experience. Both faces appear in your taskbar and
can be closed out. By sending them feedback it will default to
sending them a screenshot of all connected displays so be careful
about what you have up before submitting it. There is a checkbox in
the lower left corner of the popup window to disable sending them a
screenshot for those concerned with privacy.

To start off
with, the splash screens to start any of the applications now
includes a minimize and close button in the top right corner of the
artwork, likely for slower systems or in the event of a problem you
may not have to resort to task manager every time. This should bring
improved help to average users who may not immediately consider task
manager when there is an issue.

With Word being probably the
most used application in the Office suite, it was first on the list
to open and explore. Right away you will notice a new icon added just
below the location that in Office 2007 included the orange start
pearl. This icon was also added to Paint and WordPad in Windows 7,
this seems to be the new standard. Clicking on it will being you
to an interesting menu that will serve as a highly visual version of
the File menu did in Office 2003 and earlier. It will also serve as
your options menu for configuration and updates. Each line item on
the left navigation panel will populate the center page differently.
In the case of printing I think most of you will find it a welcome
improvement. No longer will you need to play around in the
preferences window to double side or change page settings. It is all
right there on the page for you. This menu is included on every
application within the Office 2010 suite.

The next is a
welcome change for many. The Ribbon is now highly customizable.
Whereas before you could manipulate the existing tabs, with 2010 you
can now create your own tabs from scratch and populate it with
whatever you want. In the screenshot I created a tab called "AWESOME
TAB" and populated it with some fairly useless items. However
you can choose to populate it with any item available within the 2010
ribbon, allowing for power users that want specific features and
shortcuts normally available on different tabs and sub-tabs to build
their own super tab with everything they want in one location. Within
the customization you can click and drag the ribbon tabs on the right
panel up or down to reorder them according to your personal
preferences, ensuring that your custom tabs appear first each time
you open the application. Again, this is available on all 2010
applications in the suite.

For
Visio 2010, it too has been given the same advancements to the UI and
ribbon as the rest of the Office 2010 suite. Aside from that Visio
feels much like it did under 2007 so Visio users should feel right at
home in seconds.

Outlook
was due for a major overhaul and it got it. With 2010 the number of
new features is staggering to an end user. First up is the Ribbon --
yes Outlook 2010 has a Ribbon and does a good job or organizing it in
a way that doesn’t clutter the UI. The second major difference is
that all emails are thread based now. Replies will go under the major
subject allowing you to see all the actions taken as part of that
thread. Clicking on the thread will expand it to show each email
received on that subject. You can take it a step further and expand
the thread itself to show each of your outbound items also linked to
that thread. Clicking on an outbound item will even draw a line to
the memo it was in response to. This is a major time saver for those
that deal with the typical workplace email threads that go on for
miles. Instead of “threads” Microsoft chooses to identify them as
“conversations” likely in response to Google Mail which labels
them in the same way. The mail icon left of the sender field will
display as multiple envelopes to indicate there are multiple memos as
a part of the "conversation" as opposed to a single email
on its own.

For
those of you concerned about Outlook 2010 64-bit and the requirement
that you first uninstall your Outlook 2007 32-bit edition have no
fear. As long as you leave the PST files alone in the location they
were located at for 2007, then they will be automatically imported
the first time you launch Outlook 2010. The entire process took all
of 30 seconds with 3GB in PST files in play. Indexing will take
slightly longer but it will occur silently in the background while
Outlook is running.

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"If you look at the last five years, if you look at what major innovations have occurred in computing technology, every single one of them came from AMD. Not a single innovation came from Intel." -- AMD CEO Hector Ruiz in 2007